Ta Da!--Say Hello to the New and Improved RSS Pundit

Sporting a new URL and a new blogging platform it's the new and improved RSS Pundit...


With two very full weeks worth of social media developments for the RSS Pundit, it took a little longer than the weekend, but the move is finally complete and almost ready for prime time.

The wait is over. Welcome to the new and improved RSS Pundit.

To access The new RSS Pundit, please point your browser to www.thersspundit.com/blog.

Feeds for The RSS Pundit come in three flavors including:

RDF
RSS 2.0
Atom

Going forward, send e-mail for The RSS Pundit to kip@thersspundit.com.

The journey continues...

Loss of a Friend—The RSS Pundit Bids Adieu to Blogger.com

Now that you’re reading, it’s really not as bad as it sounds…

They say that all good things must come to an end, and so it is with deciding to have The RSS Pundit and Blogger part ways.

In a sort of e-Mark Anthony quasi Shakespeare fashion, I would have you know ‘I come to praise Blogger, not to bury it.’

It was a great first choice for me, so saying goodbye to Blogger is a little like losing a good friend. It gave me my first blog. It let me snip away at it as I learned. It let me make mistakes, and it almost never complained.

It strained a bit, but it did everything it could for me—and it did all of this for free.

As my feature and resource requirements have changed, it has become all too clear to me the time has come to say so long.

I’ll post the new URL on Monday when I officially unveil The RSS Pundit 2.0 (as it were) for your use and enjoyment. I’m very pleased with how the conversion has worked out, and can say that having is actually as good as wanting (so far).

I look forward to your thoughts, suggestions, and other feedback, so please come along.

Finding Nemo in the Blogosphere--Tools for Social Media Search

So you want to know what bloggers have to say about Taylor Hicks or The Omen? Here are the tools to take you beyond Google without the need for a lengthy swim across the Pacific Ocean of traditional search.


Editor’s note: This is not yet another Google bashing diatribe.

Let’s imagine for a moment you’re a National Spelling Bee fan interested in finding out more about the word ‘ursprache’ than just its definition. Let’s also imagine you’re more interested in seeing what the blogosphere alone has to say about it rather than wading through the almost 336,000 search results that a saunter along the Google shoreline yields.

Instead of general search gear like Google, Yahoo and MSN, there are some really good tools that make my ‘ranked short list’ for viewing what the blog/social media ecosystem has to say.

These include:

IceRocket
Google Blog Search
Gada.be
Technorati

These vertical search tools for the blogosphere each offer their own advantages in terms of speed, freshness, quality of results, and ability to filter splog. IceRocket is very fast (Google Blog Search takes a close second), Gada.be has a great interface (try typing http://rss.pundit.gada.be to take it for a test drive), and Technorati’s blog profiles and tags are quite helpful.

While vertical search isn’t all that new--the fact is most vertical search tools will not survive the harsh realities of digital natural selection—there are some very cool seashells in the Internet Ocean to make your syndication life easier when it comes to search.

Give them a try; or, perhaps you could just keep swimming, swimming, swimming…